Lucas Ahlsen

Lucas Ahlsen lurks in the forests surrounding Portland, Maine, searching for challengers to play cribbage and backgammon.

SOLITAIRE IN THE STAIRWELL (JULY 17, 2015)

Marty Pitts was the kind of man who kept a fifth of vodka in his desk drawer that he never shared with anyone, and showed up to work every single day on time and out of breath. He carried himself with the dignity of a staunch middle-class citizen. He believed in the old ways, trying to prove time and again that muscle overrode guile. I sat down for a job interview at Hassler & Lockheed Insurance Agency two weeks after my 27th birthday. The ink on my degree hadn't dried yet. Call me a late bloomer. Marty's first words to me were this: "I see you put 'professional gambler' in your work experience. So you think you're a hotshot, boy?" Boy, kid, crybaby, tiger, squirt--all nicknames he rammed into my ears for the better part of a year. "Excuse me?" I asked. "I played a lot of cards in Vietnam," he said. "That ended when a mortar landed in the barracks next to ours. Now I can't so much as look at a suicide king without glancing at the sky every five seconds." The Bicycle deck sitting in my inside pocket grew heavy after he said that. I had to cross my legs. "I'm sorry to hear that." "Thanks tiger. That means," he said, "a whole lot." The white shrubs of his eyebrows lifted when he scrutinized me over his bifocals. I quickly learned that whenever Marty showed contempt, his voice scraped my ears like sandpaper. We went through the docket of questions: where I saw myself in five years, what "service" meant to me, how I react if I have to deal with a jerk and so on. I bumbled through the answers, too distracted by Marty's tie to keep focus. "What made you leave your last job?" he asked. I wanted to ask, "who the hell wears a banana print tie on a Tuesday?" but I explained my most recent disaster instead. I had lost 50,000 dollars in a high-stakes poker game to a man named Van Cleef. Damn kid shot me down in a game of Texas hold 'em, bluffing until the last card turned up to be an ace. His full house led to my foreclosed house. At that point I decided my luck had dried up, got myself an associate's degree, and landed on Planet Nine-to-Five. By the time I finished my story, Marty popped open a can of cashews and crunched on a handful. His frown undulated with the motions of his jaw, and I wondered if he enjoyed the nuts at all. "I think my experiences will be a great asset in evaluating claims," I said. "If it's one thing I can spot, it's a bluff. Isn't that a skill this company needs?" He chewed and chewed and chewed. "I'll call you in a few days."

The office they plugged me in was an old maintenance closet. If I had to guess, it measured about 15 feet deep by 6 feet wide. A small desk hosted an ancient IBM computer while the rest of the room sported heaps of hand tools. Walking in there for the first time, I had to navigate old chemical jugs, a work bench with a vise, a four foot ladder, old vacuum parts and a colony of paint cans. "Here's your desk," Marty said. "Oh, one more thing: if the toilet plugs up, low man on the totem pole gets to play plumber. Betchya didn't learn anything about that while you stuffed aces up your sleeve, huh squirt?" His grey blazer flashed its lavender lining at me as he swept out of the room and shut me in. My job performance was adequate but admirable. I knew when to bag a fraud or pass on a claim to Marty. Still, he never let me forget my place. Sometimes I thought he wadded up too much TP whenever he took a dump just so he could see with a dirty plunger. Even worse was that he smoked cigarettes every hour on the hour. In that small room with no windows, I nearly choked on the odor of stale shit and tobacco smoke. I kept with it for 10 months. Wasn't easy either. If I arrived to work a minute late, Marty called me a brat and put me on the phones all day. If I reported a problem, he called me a crybaby. If I did a good job and showed a little pride, he would say "nice work, tiger" with the sandpaper voice. Still, I didn't have it as bad as some. I once witnessed him trounce a worker over a bad prank. Evidently the culprit had overridden the company's internet filter and loaded up a slew of gay pornography on the computer of a closeted homosexual man. With a crossword in hand, Marty had just left the bathroom after his constitutional and caught the computer vandal. I was across the office floor getting a cup of coffee. Some of the phrases Marty used were, "dead weight," "waste of oxygen," and "vapid fuck puddle." Once he attracted most of the office as an audience, he fired the perpetrator. The only thunderbolt upper management threw at Marty was a verbal warning in the break room. Hooray for the totem pole!

During one of my many elevator rides to the 22nd floor, I realized that I had never seen Marty take it up. No matter how early or late I punched in, he manifested out of the aether and presented me with the day's workload. He always wheezed while he did it, and then cinched up his ridiculous tie of the day. So I took the stairs next chance I got. Far above me in the stairwell I heard the labored breaths of a man at work. My long legs and youth allowed me to climb two steps at a time. It didn't take long to catch up with Marty. "Good morning Mr. Pitts," I said from the floor below. "Mornin' kid," he said. He stopped at the next landing and leaned back against the concrete wall. The sight of him so weak made me pause. I've seen plenty of men on their last legs over a card table, staring at their hand as though a doctor just told them they colon cancer. Marty looked much worse. "You all right?" I asked. Marty lifted his briefcase. "This," he said between wheezes, "I've carried this--" "Take a moment Marty," I said. His face was red down to the wrinkles. I waited while he took ten deep breaths. "I've carried this case up these stairs for almost forty years now," he said. "I can always be certain that they’ll take me where I need to go." He gazed at me above the rims of his glasses, but he didn't use the sandpaper voice. The information struck me harder than a vodka bottle over the head. For all those months I spent spiting him, Marty climbed 22 flights of 12 stairs every single day. Sounded like penance to me. We climbed the last stairs side by side. I glanced at him, wondering if it was only that mortar explosion from 40 years ago that made him stop playing cards. Maybe he needed fixed elements in his life to help him cope--or forget.

A week into my 11th month at Hassler & Lockheed, Marty was a no-show. He didn't call out sick or call in to say he'd be late. Not that he'd do either of those to begin with. He'd arrive breathless, hand me my work, and do his crossword on the toilet with a cup of burnt coffee. That was Marty Pitts. That was who he was. A fog of gossip and whispers floated over the cubicles. I tried to block it out. After the stairwell encounter, I had come to admire the old man's resilience. I knew exactly what to expect from him, and even though I dealt with his crap, he never shit on me unless I deserved it. A cold feeling spread through my gut when I searched for him in the stairwell. I found Marty in a corner clutching his heart, with the briefcase, that damn briefcase, locked in his fingers. His briefcase had landed flat on the floor, all dumped out save a couple pens. A wash of paperwork and claims photos had spilled across the landing. The files resembled a waterfall of broken lives: burnt houses, torn cars, crumbled buildings. I wondered if Marty kept his soul hidden in there. Who knows what he did in his life besides bring fear and discipline to Hassler & Lockheed, or Vietnam, or his home--maybe what remained of him escaped when the briefcase burst open. I placed my deck of cards in the empty case and shut it. I tossed my name tag down the stairwell and left the building after I called 911 from a pay phone. Marty clung to certainty--the certainty he'd keep his job, the certainty of his authority, the certainty that his life was good and just and necessary. And that worked just fine for him, I suppose. Returning to the city streets, I meditated on an axiom I used to say around card tables, under the hot glow of a ceiling lamp: Certainty is for people who are afraid to gamble.